Argentine Democracy Held Hostage

Argentina’s democratic government, in office since December, 1983, following a decade of Peronist and military rule, is in an old form of trouble from an old source.

A clandestine campaign of terror is being waged, with help from elements in the Argentine security forces. The aim may simply be money--the large wages of gangsterism--or the ultimate aim may be to undermine support for the Raul Alfonsin government, eventually opening the way for a military coup d’etat .

Terror takes the form of gangland-style kidnapings of prominent Argentine businessmen, aided and abetted by members of the federal police and the military intelligence services. The implicit message is that the new government is incapable of guaranteeing the safety and human rights of citizens.

The United States has a large stake in the Argentine government and its protection against internal enemies from the far right. Argentina has been touted here as the vanguard in a tide of “democratization” that is supposed to be sweeping over Latin America. The Reagan Administration has been loud in its praise of the democratic reforms enacted by Alfonsin, especially of his efforts to bring private ownership back to key sectors of the Argentine economy. And there is a financial stake: Alfonsin’s government has been congratulated for its commitment to orderly repayment of international debt, much of it owed to private U.S. banks.

Kidnapings and disappearances used to be routine facts of Argentine life and death. Since 1979, more than 200 prominent Argentine businessmen have been abducted by gunmen and held for ransom--according to official records. Most of these kidnapings occurred while the military junta was in power, but they have continued since the transition to democracy. Over the last two years, at least 10 kidnapings of corporate figures have made major news stories in Argentina.

“Ten is a low figure,” according to Juan E. Mendez, an Argentine lawyer who heads the Washington bureau of Americas Watch, a nonprofit organization monitoring human-rights violations in the Western Hemisphere. “There have probably been many more kidnapings than that; in many cases, the families of the victims have quietly paid the ransom and tried to hush the whole thing up.”

Businessmen from Argentina’s large Jewish community have received special attention from the kidnapers. Two such cases involving prominent businessmen have been dragging on for more than a year, amid much publicity.

One concerns financier Osvaldo Sivak, first kidnaped in 1979 and then kidnaped again in July, 1985--now presumed dead. The other involves Daniel Guillermo Heller, president of a large wood-products firm and owner of the fashionable Libertador Club, for tennis and squash, in Buenos Aires. Heller fled Argentina in June, 1985, in fear of his life.

The Heller case has created an uproar in Argentina. Although he is in hiding outside the country, the 34-year-old businessman has been using the media to keep his case before the Argentine public.

In a series of paid advertisements in Buenos Aires newspapers and in telephone interviews with Argentine and foreign journalists, Heller has publicly accused the Argentine police and courts of complicity with a gangster “commando” he says is trying to kidnap or kill him. Most recently, in videocassettes mailed to Argentine television stations, he urged intervention by the Alfonsin government to save his life.

The Sivak matter offers some support for Heller’s charges of police collusion with gangsters. This past April, three former military intelligence agents--once handpicked by the Ministry of Defense to crack the Sivak case--were arrested and charged with swindling Sivak’s family.

One of the three, 39-year-old Mario Aguilar, an ex-Argentine Army Intelligence agent with links to high-ranking army officials going back to the days of the junta’s “dirty war,” has confessed. He has admitted posing as an intermediary between the kidnapers and the family in order to convince the Sivaks to pay a ransom of up to $500,000 which he and his associates pocketed. This payment was in addition to a million-dollar ransom, paid in August, 1985, matching the first $1 million paid to free Sivak when he was kidnaped in 1979.

But a growing number of observers believe that Aguilar’s confession is a cover-up. Mendez of Americas Watch said:

“What is slowly emerging is evidence that Aguilar and the others were the actual kidnapers. Not only that, it is almost certain that some of these people were involved in the kidnaping of Sivak in 1979, on the orders of the (junta’s) Defense Ministry.”

Publicity surrounding the Sivak and Heller cases has put Argentina’s democratic government in a serious bind. If it does not act to calm the business community’s fears by launching an all-out crackdown on kidnaping, it risks losing support from business and, by extension, the undermining of its program of economic revival through private sector growth and foreign investment. And failure to quash domestic terrorism, whether the terror is criminally motivated or politically inspired, could cast a shadow over the government’s admirable record on the human-rights front.

Government action, however, would have to include investigation of the charges of collusion between the kidnapers and the Argentine forces of order. Such inquiries are certain to alienate further a police and military establishment already furious over the recent punishment of junta leaders.

The current kidnapings in Argentina are a direct legacy of the “dirty war” of the 1970s, when the junta gave paramilitary groups free rein to kidnap, torture and kill its opponents, liberal and left-wing. During those years, as many as 20,000 people “disappeared” in concentration camps and crematoriums. Now, with a democratic regime in power and many top junta leaders in jail, the newest versions of the old “death squads” have made a specialty of holding wealthy victims for ransom. Human-rights activists believe that they operate with the connivance of friends in the largely unpurged middle levels of the Establishment.

Alfonsin and his Radical Party have felt obliged to walk a political tightrope between the discredited but still powerful military and the large body of public opinion that demands retribution against the armed forces. So, while the government has prosecuted leaders of the military junta and their more notorious underlings for human rights violations during the “dirty war,” it has stopped short of a major purge in the federal police and military intelligence services.

Critics charge that the government’s hesitation to force a showdown may already have cost the life of Osvaldo Sivak; nothing has been heard from him for more than a year. And Heller remains in exile.

If the kidnapings continue, corporate support for the democratic government will be eroded and laudable economic reform programs launched by Alfonsin will be put in jeopardy; other fearful executives may flee the country and, perhaps more important, foreign companies may reconsider planned investments in Argentina.

This may be the time to force a showdown with the military right and its clandestine operatives. It will not be easy, as Mendez explained: “The reactionaries in the police and military represent only 10% or so of the Argentine people. But it is a powerful 10%--committed, mobilized people, with vast experience in the techniques of destabilization.”

Heller told his U.S. attorney, Ray L. Hanna, “I won’t go back home until my security is guaranteed,” explaining, “If businessmen like us don’t have certain guarantees of security, how can a democracy develop?”